I was in Burgos, Spain, a smallish city in northwestern Spain for nearly the entire week (Monday until Saturday morning) and thorougly enjoyed it. It's a very manageable-sized city--one can walk from the city centre to the edges of the city in a bit more than an hour. And it has many beautiful churches, including its spectacular cathedral, which is apparently one of the earliest examples of a Gothic cathedral in Spain. (Which means, of course, that I loved it.) I then moved on to Avila for Saturday, and managed to cram in three more cloisters that afternoon!
It was an eight-and-a-half cloister week (eight cloisters, and one cloister-adjacent-garden), with several days of seeing two or three in one day, with four of those being non-Dominican cloisters, and four-and-a-half of them being Dominican. More cloisters than any other week so far!
The first monastery that I visited was Santa Maria la Real de las Huelgas, which was founded in 1187 and the main female Cistercian monastery in Spain. One of the really interesting things about monasteries in Spain is that if a monastery is designated "Real", that often means it served both as a monastery and as a residence of the royal court. (It seems that sometimes "Real" just means that it was a royal foundation.) In this case, "Real" does mean that the royal court was sometimes in residence at this particular monastery, and interestingly, almost all of the "pantheon of royals" as one of my guides phrased it are buried there. There are some spectacular funerary chapels full of sarcophagi!
I know this because the only way to see the cloisters there was to take a guided tour...in Spanish. I did take a fair bit of Spanish in high school, but it's been a while since then! I've found that when I enter a foreign (but Romance-language-speaking) country, it takes me a few days to get to peak comprehension (at least, as good as I'm going to get without further studies), and this was tossing myself into the deep end, because I'd been in Spain less than 24 hours, but took an entire hour-and-a-half-long tour in Spanish. I didn't get 100% of what was going on, but I got more than I expected! And a later tour was better...but I'll get to that in a moment.
One of the cloisters (the larger one) there was completely paved, something I hadn't seen yet, with a fountain in the middle and what looked like drainage ditches leading to the fountain, which was interesting because I didn't see a mechanism for actually letting the water in the fountain. I'm sure there is one--all I had was the view from inside the portico of the cloister because the tour didn't go into the actual cloister, so I couldn't look at it close up--but I didn't see it.
The smaller cloister was a more stereotypical little box-hedge-deliniated cloister--nothing especially to write home about, but a good data point.
The third cloister I visited was actually one I wasn't planning on visiting--the cloister of the Cathedral of Burgos. I was told that it was supposed to be beautiful, and I wasn't about to pass up a cloister if I was going to visit the Cathedral anyway. It was a really interesting cloister in that it was the first one I'd so far seen that was a "double decker cloister" where the top and bottom stories of the cloister actually matched.
The second monastery of the week was Santo Domingo de Silos, a Benedictine monastery that quite possibly dates back to the 10th century. There are technically two cloisters, but only one of them is open to the public, and because Benedictine cloisters aren't the main focus of my research, I didn't press to see the other one. The one I did see was a beautiful Romanesque cloister (I've decided that even though Gothic is my favorite style for church architecture, Romanesque cloisters are my favorite)
It has the most complex planting plan of any cloister I've yet come across, so much so that I believe it took almost two hours for me to finish with my observations and sketches. (Not all of that was on the planting plan, but a lot of it was.) And yet, all the complexity was completely regular and symmetrical (minus the gigantic cypress in one corner) and I found it quite beautiful. It was a matching double-decker cloister, as well! It might be my favorite cloister overall so far, although that's a dangerous statement to make.
Third was the Monasterio Real de Santo Domingo in Caleruega, the birthplace of St. Dominic. The monastery there is built around the family home of St. Dominic's family, the Guzman-Azas, because all three of the sons of the family ultimately became Dominicans (one of them being St. Dominic). The building started shortly after the death of St. Dominic, making the cloister there, along with the Couvent des Jacobins in Toulouse, one of the oldest cloisters of the Dominican Order. I had thought I wouldn't be able to visit, because I had emailed the tourism office earlier this year, and the person who runs it had said he was going on vacation during the time I would be in the area, and wasn't sure if he'd have a replacement. (The fact that I am emailing tourism offices of tiny Spanish towns is one of the more surreal parts of this research trip.) But there was a replacement, and she ended up giving me a one-on-one tour...in Spanish. Because there weren't any other tourists there for the 10:30 tour. Thank goodness, though, I had both acclimated more to Spanish in general, but also that she talked slowly enough for me to understand!
The cloister there is simple but beautiful, another double-layered cloister, although in this case the top and bottom didn't exactly match in terms of materiality. I think the most interesting part about it for me was the cypress trees--the guide spent a few minutes telling me about the significance of cypress trees in cloisters (most of which I had already deduced, since I've seen multiple cloisters with cypresses in them) but one detail she mentioned that suddenly makes a lot of sense is that cypresses have taproot-type roots. Their roots don't tend to spread and push up the pavement and invade foundations like many other trees do, so it's fine to plant them near buildings. An instance of something I've been observing--oftentimes, features or imagery in churches or cloisters are chosen initially for practicality, and then develop a religious explanation. That doesn't make the religious explanation any less important, but I find figuring out both explanations to be a very satisfying experience.
There's a convent of Dominican friars attached to the monastery there, and they have a vaguely cloister-adjacent garden (it has a cloister portico at one end) and I made some notes on it because I'm amassing a surprisingly large collection of "kind of a cloister but not actually closed" examples, and I'm curious if they'll have any similarities.
My last visit of the week was to Santo Tomas in Avila, which has three cloisters, at least partially because it's really the Monasterio Real de Santo Tomas, meaning there's at least one extra cloister called the "King's Cloister", where the king would reside at least occasionally.
The first cloister is the Novices or Infirmary cloister (interesting reverberations with the Cloister Plan of Saint Gall, in which the infirmary has a cloister, and Cluny, where the novices had their own cloister), which is quite simple--flagstones, a single tree, and a well. It was a good warmup, before moving on to...
The Cloister of Silence. This cloister is the "working cloister" of the monastery (which is really what the French would call a "convent" because it's just the friars there and it's not cloisters) in that it's the one that's truly attached to the church and is used for processions. It also, interestingly, is where the friars used to be buried. I have never encountered a cloister garden that was used a cemetery before--typically, monasteries or convents will have separate cemeteries, and they certainly won't put their dead in the cloister. So, I found that fascinating. It also has a 'fountain house' in the corner, for washing of hands, like several other cloisters I've seen. Tracing the lineage of that feature will be a lot of fun, I think.
The last cloister is the Cloister of Kings or King's Cloister. This one was probably my favourite just as far as analysis goes, because as much as I loved the Gothic-ness of the Cloister of Silence, it had buttresses, which are one of my least favourite things to try to include when I'm drawing the plan layout of a cloister. The King's Cloister is relatively simple, with regemented plantings, a similar drainage system to the others (I'm going to have a field day with the drainage systems, I'm pretty sure) and a well in the middle. But there are roses in it, and it's expansive, and a very nice place to spend time. :)
I hope you've enjoyed this update! It's been a good (albeit tiring) week.
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